Masaomi Yasunaga

Masaomi Yasunaga lives and works in Iga-shi, Mie Prefecture, Japan. He was a student of Satoru Hoshino, a coterie of the avant-garde ceramic group Sodeisha: a post-war (1940s – 1990s) movement that questioned the mandate of functionality within the ceramic medium and pioneered a new sculptural philosophy. Yasunaga extends the legacy of Sodeisha group’s experimental ethos by focusing on the process of creation, centred around the sculptural form rather than the functional use of the object. While pottery is often made of clay and baked in a kiln and sealed with a finishing coat of glaze, Yasunaga adopts glaze as the primary material from which to build his sculptural works. Yasunaga masters creativity by combining unique raw materials such as feldspars, whole rocks, metal or glass powders, with his own methods such as creating glazed vessels with increased viscosity which are then pit fired in sand. Yasunaga’s forms are buried in various strata of sand or kaolin (unrefined porcelain clay) to preserve their structure in the firing stage. After cooling, Yasunaga’s sculptures are excavated from their beds in a studio process analogous to archaeological excavation and discovery. The yielded objects appear honed and shaped by earthly elements over centuries, some whole and others curiously fragmented. Aesthetically, these sculptures are simultaneously primitive and contemporary; objects of human culture which appear as if lost and found, seeming to confirm the supremacy of nature’s order over the world of mankind.They are extraordinary objects, tactile things with insistent, engrossing physicality.